Baz Jazz Hands: William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet

This is the second in a bi-monthly 2023 series revisiting the six films of director Baz Luhrmann, on the heels of Elvis finishing in my top ten last year.

As soon as I started watching William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, I was struck by the fact that it was a forerunner, in some ways, for two other films I love -- in fact, two future #1s. 

Which means maybe I just wasn't ready for it yet in 1996.

Oh, I didn't dislike Baz Luhrmann's second feature film, the first I had seen at that time. But I do remember feeling a bit irritated by its style, and by some of the histrionic displays of emotion by Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, as I was watching last night, I asked myself the following chicken-or-the-egg question: "Do I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies because of DiCaprio's histrionics, or do I find DiCaprio histrionic because I think of Romeo & Juliet as one of Shakespeare's lesser tragedies?"

I think there's evidence of this being a lesser tragedy, at least from the plot side. Romeo & Juliet is not a play I've seen over and over again like I have with Hamlet (my favorite) or Macbeth (the one that seems to have been remade the most recently, plus I've also seen two older versions within the last five years). So each new exposure to Romeo & Juliet is a reminder of the plot, or lack thereof. 

I didn't mind that I'd chosen this viewing for the night before a four-day weekend, when my brain was dead from two really busy weeks at work. (I should say, it's a four-day weekend for most people -- for me, the weekend lasts until a week from Tuesday, as I am going to Vietnam for a resort holiday. I should probably tell you more about that, but not today.) I didn't mind the timing of the viewing because a) I already knew the basic story, so little failures to parse the dialogue would not make a difference, and b) it doesn't seem that there really is much of a story.

Unlike, as a point of comparison, all the minute twists and turns in the outlook of characters in Hamlet, as well as some really interesting plot mechanics, Romeo & Juliet seems like it can be primarily broken down as such: Boy and girl meet and fall in love. Their families hate each other. Girl arranged to marry dopey guy she hates, so pretends to kill herself to escape. Boy thinks she's really killed herself so then kills himself. Girl sees he's killed himself so really kills herself.

Unless I missed them, there don't seem to be a lot of interesting digressions from this. The characters on each side of the feud exist merely to dramatize the intensity of the feud. A couple characters (Mercutio and Tybalt) are killed near the mid-point of the story, but the only effect of that is really to yet further intensify the feud.

Am I oversimplifying Romeo & Juliet, which, to its credit, does contain some of Shakespeare's most widely quoted text? Perhaps. But last night's viewing did nothing to improve that general impression of the material.

It did make me realize, though, how much of a debt my #1 film of 2000 owed to it -- and how it had some probably more coincidental echoes in my #1 film of 1997.

Michael Almereyda's 2000 version of Hamlet, the one where Ethan Hawke gives the "To be or not to be" speech in a Blockbuster video, was a huge success for me, as I went on to name it my best of that year. And to be certain, I had already seen William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet at that time.

What the passage of four years apparently made me forget was that this movie has exactly the same framing device as Hamlet, which is a television newscaster reading the opening and closing lines of the play, functioning as sort of a Greek chorus -- though it's dialogue that would belong to an actual character in each play (I'm just not going to look that up right now to tell you who). 

When I saw this transpiring in Romeo + Juliet, I was shocked at the directness of how Almereyda ripped off what Luhrmann was doing here. I mean, any modern adaptation of Shakespeare, which both of these are, might be inclined to use a television newscaster as part of the proceedings. But the fact that both films begin and end with it as well? Perhaps critics raked Almereyda over the coals for this at the time, but if so, I didn't hear it. (Granted, it wasn't as easy in 2000 to read all the reviews you could possibly want to read about a movie you loved. I believe this was before the invention of Rotten Tomatoes.)

That's the most obvious way Hamlet is indebted to Romeo + Juliet, but what about a less obvious way, that you'd call a coincidence if both of the films were being produced simultaneously. Actress Diane Venora appears in both films, here as Juliet's mother Gloria, there as Hamlet's mother Gertrude. I almost feel like Luhrmann might have cast her just to be cheeky, since her last name is Venora and the play takes place "in fair Verona." Maybe Luhrmann is a fan of word jumbles. Almereyda seems almost certainly to have cast her in order to evoke Luhrmann's film -- or at least because that film gave him evidence she could do this sort of material.

The second point of comparison that I couldn't help notice was with Titanic, though this likely falls more into the category of coincidental.

It made me realize, possibly for the first time, that there is a real Romeo & Juliet quality to Jack and Rose's relationship in Titanic. Sure the similarity became obvious to me because DiCaprio played both Romeo and Jack, but there are other elements that solidify that similarity. For one, Rose being rich and Jack being poor is a similar sort of "opposites attract" scenario that informs their Montague-Capulet style pairing. But then there are also similarities with the way their romance develops, including scenes of going hand in hand to run around corners and evade the pursuit of the people who would stop them. Even the element of suicide is common between them, as you recall that Rose is considering jumping off the back of the ship at the time Jack meets her.

One other similarity I could not ignore. Although Paul Rudd technically plays the role of Romeo's romantic rival, Paris (Dave Paris, ha ha), Paris is a bit of a drip and doesn't much factor in to the story. (And what a babyface version of Rudd!) Romeo's real antagonist, whom he eventually kills, is Tybalt, played by John Leguizamo. I couldn't help notice a physical similarity between Leguizamo and Jack's rival in Titanic, played by Billy Zane. Imagine them in your mind and you'll see what I mean. (By the way, as many times as I've seen Titanic -- I want to say it's about six -- I had to look up his character's name just now. Caledon Hockley? That doesn't sound right.)

Of course, the real similarities are between this and Luhrmann's future work. Naturally it's easy to see similarities to his very next film, Moulin Rouge!, which also includes an illicit tragic romance where the central pair are trying to evade a romantic rival. Some of the most "in your face" aspects of Romeo + Juliet from a style perspective are just getting warmed up for Moulin Rouge! Then the film is also a reminder of the future The Great Gatsby, as there are big parties here that resemble the big parties there -- plus of course both films star DiCaprio. (I caught myself wondering what Luhrmann might have done as the director of last year's Babylon, instead of Damien Chazelle. Would certainly have had a lot more heart.)

To be clear, the style elements that maybe didn't work for me in 1996 do in fact work for me now. In fact, I think they are an essential part of what I've come to call this series: Baz Jazz Hands. If I didn't like the choices Luhrmann made with his camera, with his editing, with his anachronisms, etc., I likely wouldn't be doing a series like this at all.

I have to come back to DiCaprio's histrionics before I close things out for today.

I may be overstating this a little bit. DiCaprio has always been a good actor, even back then, and I suspect any tendency to turn things up to 11 was the result of a direct request from his director. His screaming of "I am fortune's fool!" is something I always think of as a telling moment from this film, and I think I thought it was all a bit too much back then. Which, as suggested earlier, may just be my notion that the whole play is a bit overwrought. 

There are really only a few moments like this, and I do think DiCaprio does a better job than Claire Danes as Juliet. She's not bad, but I did think she seemed a little uncomfortable with some of the dialogue. I do remember really swooning for her at this age, probably because she reminds me a little bit of a former girlfriend, just around the face. (As opposed to, you know, her elbows.) But I also noticed a moment when she does this sort of choking cry that seems a bit off -- and I noticed it in particular because Danes has this really over-the-top crying seen in Fleishman is in Trouble. It's not that her crying strikes me as artificial, but maybe just that few actresses are willing to "cry ugly" the way Danes is willing to "cry ugly."

So as not to leave you with a negative impression of what I thought about these two, I do find their scenes together to be incredibly romantic -- a function of both their chemistry, and Luhrmann's expert ability to conjure romance on screen. 

Okay I clearly had a lot more to say about this movie than maybe I thought I would going in.

In June I'll be back with what has historically been my favorite Luhrmann film, Moulin Rouge! We'll see if it still holds that crown after my first viewing since 2011.

The unconscionable length of Avatar 2 is galling

I'm going to Avatar: The Way of Water on Wednesday in order to have a review up before the weekend, and because a friend suggested we go see it, and I suggested $35 seats at the IMAX cinema at the museum because might as well.

I had no idea, though, that I might need to clear my schedule for the whole day.

This movie is an absurd 192 minutes long. That's only two minutes shorter than Titanic.

Insert joke here about Titanic definitely not needing to be that length, but I will shoot that joke down if you try to. I value every single moment of Titanic, and there are many others out there who agree with me.

Avatar is a completely different story.

If James Cameron's idea were to fit every last bit of Pandora and Na'avi and Unobtanium that's floating around in his head into one movie, I get the three hours and 12 minutes. But Cameron has potentially three more Avatar movies still rolling around up there, though he's acknowledged it will only be one if The Way of Water flops.

Which, I've got to be honest, I think it will. 

As strange as it may seem to say this, Cameron has actually been a filmmaker of some restraint throughout his career. He hasn't pushed every success he's had to its breaking point. Only once before has he directed a sequel to one of his own movies, and it was actually arguably his best movie in Terminator 2. He made a dynamite sequel to someone else's movie in Aliens, but then disembarked the franchise at that point. He never pushed for a sequel to The Abyss, to True Lies, or, it may be obvious to say, to Titanic. 

The length of Avatar: The Way of Water in itself may not be out of character for Cameron, but its length, combined with its visit to a world we stopped caring about as soon as we left the theater in 2009, is. In the past, Cameron has always known what we've wanted and given it to us. Now, he thinks we want four more Avatar movies when there is no conceivable way that we do.

Maybe we'd want four more movies if this one were a reasonable length, meaning Cameron was planning to tell discrete, distinct stories, almost like episodes of a long-running TV series. A 100-minute Avatar movie? Sign me up.

But The Way of Water is 17 minutes longer than the longest 2022 movie I had been aware of to this point, that being The Batman. And that's part of a series that has proven time and again that we are willing to back to the well for more material.

Making any sequels to Avatar always felt like a gamble. So what if Jake Sully awakened in fully realized Na'avi mode at the end of that movie, ready for more Na'avi adventures. Just because he wanted them didn't mean we did.

The really silly thing about this is that this has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cameron took the unusual proactive approach of acknowledging that the world might have moved on from Avatar and that he may only be able to justify one more movie financially. At three hours and 12 minutes, he's made it a virtual certainty that the movie won't garner the sort of repeat viewings that made Titanic and Avatar (a modest 162 minutes) such gargantuan hits. Without making bank from people going a second and third and fourth time, is there even a path to viewing this movie as a hit?

But maybe it's a picture that becomes clearer the more we look at it. Maybe Cameron already knows he's not making Avatar 4 and Avatar 5 and has front-loaded the story he wanted to end up with into the second and third movies, the latter of which must already be a fait accompli. How else to justify three and a quarter hours with characters we never even liked that much to begin with?

The other issue with the future Avatar movies is that too little time will elapse between them for each to represent a big technological jump forward from the previous one, the sort of technological jump we implicitly crave as viewers. Clearly we are thrilled by the possibilities of how the technology has advanced, in ways we might not have even imagined, in the 13 years since Avatar. When there's only two years elapsing between releases, and they are being made simultaneously with presumably similar technology, that part completely drops out of the equation.

And yet I have ponied up $35 to see it on the largest screen possible on Wednesday.

I don't want to root against Avatar: The Way of Water. I think cinema is a better place when there are wunderkinds willing to push the technology to its breaking point to give us breathtaking escapism. 

But I've already decided that if I have to leave in the middle of The Way of Water to go to the bathroom, so be it. I wouldn't have done that during Avengers: Infinity War, which was 12 minutes shorter, but I'm going to assume that the sea of Avatar blue will not miss me for five minutes at some point in the middle of this behemoth. 

My 1997 film rankings (in 1997)

This is the second to last in a 2022 monthly posting of the 12 year-end rankings I completed prior to starting this blog, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary of ranking movies. I'm posting them as a form of permanent backup, plus to do a little analysis of how my impression of the movies has changed since then. I'm going in reverse order and will end with 1996 next month. 

A lot of the recent years I've written about have contained some sort of volatility in where I lived or what I was doing. Nineteen ninety-seven sort of breaks that trend. I lived in Providence, Rhode Island the entire year, where I served as the reporter for the Barrington Times, a weekly newspaper in an affluent community about 15 minutes from Providence. Even as I type this now, though, I realized there was sort of a big change mid-way through the year, when I was the interim editor of the newspaper for about three months, the summer months, while they sought a new permanent editor. For a while I thought that might be me, but let's be honest -- at age 23 going on 24, I didn't have the experience. Nor am I sure I really wanted the weight of an entire community newspaper on my shoulders, and all the Sisyphean tasks that involves. And the guy they brought in had been in newspapers for like 30 years. I ended up really liking him. (R.I.P.)

As for my former editor who left for greener pastures, well, I still send her Christmas cards to this day. 

The year 1997 did contain another momentous occasion, though: That January, I made my first year-end movie list. It's the 25 years since January 1997 that I started celebrating at the beginning of this year, though of course now it's closer to 26 years ago. For those first few years, I hacked out the whole list at the end of the year, after I'd reached my cutoff date -- I can't remember if it was the date of the Oscar nominations at that point, in which case, it may have been early February. By the time I lived in New York I was definitely composing the list as I went, but at this point, I took all the films I had seen -- a relatively small number, as you will see in a minute -- and shaped them into one definitive ranking in one session of organizing. I prefer my current method obviously -- it works much better when you have more than 150 films -- but there was something pure about not thinking about it all year and then reaching definitive conclusions within a couple hours. Of course, "not thinking about it all year" became the problem and quickly put an end to this practice.

As for Titanic, well, watching it for the first time in theaters was one of the great moviegoing experiences of my entire life. Instead of rehashing that experience, I'll just refer you to when I wrote about it back in 2010. After that dizzying evening, no other movie had any hope. 

Here are my favorite to least favorite films of 1997, as I ranked them in early 1998:

1. Titanic
2. Contact
3. Face/Off
4. Starship Troopers
5. Waiting for Guffman
6. Liar Liar
7. Donnie Brasco
8. Boogie Nights
9. The Full Monty
10. Private Parts
11. U-Turn
12. L.A. Confidential
13. Hercules
14. Men in Black
15. Breakdown 
16. In the Company of Men
17. The Wings of the Dove
18. Wag the Dog
19. Air Force One
20. One Night Stand
21. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
22. Scream 2
23. Amistad
24. Fierce Creatures
25. Anaconda
26. subUrbia
27. Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion
28. Chasing Amy
29. I Know What You Did Last Summer
30. The Devil's Advocate
31. Night Falls on Manhattan
32. Volcano
33. Grosse Point Blank
34. She's So Lovely
35. In and Out
36. The Fifth Element
37. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
38. Addicted to Love
39. Speed 2: Cruise Control

And here is the order in which those movies rank out of 6145 movies currently on my Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 6145 and the number of slots they rose or fell on my Flickchart compared to the other movies from that year that I ranked at the time. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.

1. Starship Troopers (46, 99%) 3
2. Titanic (61, 99%) -1
3. Boogie Nights (107, 98%) 5
4. Contact (190, 97%) -2
5. Breakdown (305, 95%) 10
6. Face/Off (369, 94%) -3
7. Men in Black (413, 93%) 7
8. L.A. Confidential (452, 93%) 4
9. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (498, 92%) 12
10. Liar Liar (504, 92%) -4
11. The Full Monty (555, 91%) -2
12. Donnie Brasco (600, 90%) -5
13. Waiting for Guffman (688, 89%) -8
14. Hercules (1114, 82%) -1
15. The Wings of the Dove (1171, 81%) 2
16. Private Parts (1301, 79%) -6
17. In the Company of Men (1635, 73%) -1
18. U-Turn (1937, 68%) -7
19. Fierce Creatures (2077, 66%) 5
20. Air Force One (2243, 63%) -1
21. One Night Stand (2592, 58%) -1
22. Amistad (2638, 57%) 1
23. Anaconda (3196, 48%) 2
24. Chasing Amy (3207, 48%) 4
25. Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (3286, 47%) 2
26. Scream 2 (3410, 45%) -4
27. Night Falls on Manhattan (3980, 35%) 4
28. Suburbia (4118, 33%) -2
29. Wag the Dog (4230, 31%) -11
30. The Devil's Advocate (4255, 31%) 0
31. Grosse Point Blank (4872, 21%) 2
32. In & Out (4970, 19%) 3
33. The Fifth Element (5036, 18%) 3
34. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (5061, 18%) 3
35. I Know What You Did Last Summer (5317, 13%) -6
36. Volcano (5406, 12%) -4
37. Addicted to Love (5415, 12%) 1
38. Speed 2: Cruise Control (5794, 6%) 1
39. She's So Lovely (5837, 5%) -5  

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Cube, The Ice Storm, The Sweet Hereafter, Taste of Cherry, Ulee's Gold
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, B.A.P.S., Batman & Robin, Booty Call, Jungle 2 Jungle
Biggest risers: Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (+12), Breakdown (+10), Men in Black (+7)
Biggest fallers: Wag the Dog (-11), Waiting for Guffman (-8), U-Turn (-7)
Stayed the same: The Devil's Advocate (30th)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 58.72% (2 of 11 so far)

I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about my lowest ranked film of the year, which deserves an asterisk. I've written about this before as well, but it's worth giving it a second explanation here, rather than just a link. I "watched" Speed 2 on a plane trip to Atlanta for my cousin's wedding. These were the days when there was only one movie playing on a communal screen, and you had to pay for the headphones. I didn't pay for the headphones but watched most of the movie without sound. That I could a) actually say I saw it, and b) decide that it was the worst movie I "saw," now both seem extremely short-sighted. Nonetheless, I cannot go back and correct the record, I can only present it with this asterisk. (I have since officially watched the movie and I found it merely mediocre. It hasn't risen that much on Flickchart yet but at least it is no longer in the bottom slot for this year.)

It's also interesting to note that Starship Troopers seems like a bit of an odd #1 for the year, even though I know I love it and even though I know that in the past ten years, that love has increased significantly from an already high level. I think in a straight duel between Titanic and Starship Troopers I might pick Titanic, but then again I might not. It might depend on the day.

Overall I was surprised that this was my #2 year overall, behind only 1999, in terms of the strength of these films on Flickchart, with that very high average of 58.72%. I always think of 1999 as an incredibly strong year, but rarely think of 1997 as such. Given that my highest two years so far are pre-2000, I'm wondering if it gives credence to a couple notions, namely that the older a film is, the rosier it is in my eyes, or maybe just that these older films have had the time to settle in as undisputed classics, where the more recent years wouldn't have had the same amount of time. Those two things may sort of be the same thing.

In terms of risers, I think it wasn't possible in 1997 to know how much the first Austin Powers movie, and to a lesser extent Men in Black, would endure in the culture, and in my own affections. (I don't mean that Men in Black has endured less, just that it was more obvious at the time that it would probably endure.) I was actually surprised to see them as low as they were. The other biggest riser is Breakdown, the great and under-discussed Kurt Russell trucker thriller, which I know can go a lot higher than #305 on my chart if it gets the right duels. 

In terms of fallers, I was surprised that Wag the Dog had this far to fall considering that I think of myself as always disliking it -- or more to the point, always finding it very self-congratulatory. I wouldn't have guessed that it was in the upper half of my list in 1997, ahead of such films as the aforementioned Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. I still think of myself as cherishing Waiting for Guffman, but given my increasing disappointment with Christopher Guest's films after this, it has likely suffered in retrospect. U-Turn was always a film I liked more than other people did, and I think over time I have internalized the other perspectives on it. (I did rewatch it and I still liked it pretty well, but realized my own initial assessment of it was inflated.)

Okay I've only got one more of these to go! I wrap with 1996 in December.

COVID Film Festival: Day One

I have COVID.

My wife has been saying it's inevitable that we would all soon get it, now that they've lifted the last of the mask mandates (we had to wear them on public transportation up until about a week ago), and true enough, my time has come.

Given that I managed to hold out for more than 26 months from when people really started talking about it, it was quite surreal to see that second line come up on the RAT test. (Note: Saying "RAT test" is kind of like saying "ATM machine," but everyone else does it so I will too.) But I kind of knew it would, because the small cough I'd had for a day or two had gotten worse, and now there was snot involved, and a feeling of wooziness and sweating. (Though my temperature was in the normal range. Go figure.)

I'd almost gotten to the point of scoffing at the possibility of getting COVID, not because I feel like I'm impervious to it or because being triple-vaccinated makes it impossible I would get it. We all know now that the vaccine doesn't prevent you from getting it, if it ever did, but it usually makes the symptoms more manageable. No, I was kind of starting to doubt it because every time I've had symptoms of something in the past, I have not tested positive. Even when my younger son tested positive for it about three weeks ago, and I also felt shitty, I returned negative tests on four straight days before I decided I was just wasting tests, especially since I felt better by then.

My wife has even begun to tease me a bit, like I'm a hypochondriac, which is funny coming from her because she is so vigilant about all the right things to do when it comes to COVID.

Well, now I have it and it could be a lot worse. I'm coughing some, I'm sneezing some, I have occasional pains in my chest. But none of these are really dominating me. I wouldn't want to focus on work, and I'm on my first official sick day today after a long weekend. But I can obviously do things like write this blog post.

Oh, and watch a movie marathon on the projector on my garage wall.

That's right, I'm isolating from my family, who have been testing negative, in our garage. My wife actually offered me the upstairs wing, where my younger son also sleeps, since he's had it recently and probably does not need to be isolated from me (though we're doing that anyway out of an abundance of caution). She'd sleep on the couch. But I know she doesn't sleep well on the couch, and I sleep well anywhere, including a mishmash of beanbag chairs in our garage, which is where I am typing this right now.

And because I have COVID, there's no judgment from anyone if I just sit here and watch movies. And sports, but movies is what I want to talk to you about today, because this is not a sports blog. (Though I've got to write quickly because my Celtics are scheduled to try to finish off the Nets in about 20 minutes, and I've got baseball after that -- then more movies.)

Yesterday I watched four, and I thought I would write a little something about each of them.

Titanic at 25

James Camerson's Oscar-winning and box office-busting epic is turning 25 this year, though that's not the reason I watched it yesterday. I watched it as the latest in my series of revisiting all my former #1 movies in 2022, in order to rank them at the end of the year. It's the ninth I've watched and I've got 17 more to go.

It's the first time I watched it in ten years since it had that theatrical 3D re-release, and again, it still holds up for me. The visuals hold up, outside of the digital people on the deck of the ship during the "helicopter shots," and they aren't on screen for very long and aren't much of a distraction. But more than that the story still holds up in all its epic romantic grandeur. I still feel like this is sort of the epitome of all the elements of movie magic coming together in one 195-minute movie, and on this, which I think is my fifth viewing, it's still just as good for me as it was the first time. I still get choked up in about the same three predicable spots.

Without COVID, I'm not really sure when I would have gotten the chance to watch this. I mean theoretically if I started just after 9 at night, I'd finish just after midnight, but we all know you have to take breaks in a three-hour movie. Starting at 11 a.m. was much better.

I kind of thought I would half-watch it and do other things on my computer, given the number of times I've seen it and how well I know it. The fact that I didn't is an indication of how much I still love it. I still want to take in all the details. 

I've also been watching James Cameron on MasterClass, and though I haven't seen him discuss anything related to Titanic yet, I did notice a technique that I hadn't previously ascribed to him. In a breakdown of the nightclub scene in The Terminator, Cameron made mention of his use of the POV perspective of his camera, and I noticed that in use a couple times in Titanic. 

She was only 15 years old

Forgive the bad Michael Caine paraphrase, or at least a paraphrase of their Michael Caine impersonation in The Trip.

I'd planned to follow Titanic with something shorter and lighter and preferably something I hadn't seen, but when I saw Can't Buy Me Love available for streaming on Disney+, I knew it was time to revisit this 1980s favorite that I probably haven't seen in 30 years.

This one also holds up for me, and part of that is the great performance of Amanda Peterson as Cindy Mancini, the puppy dog Ronald Miller's love interest. 

Poor Amanda Peterson, who died of a drug overdose in 2015. (So much for being lighter!)

I had forgotten how she died and thought it was either an accident or a rare disease, but on a check on Wikipedia I noticed it was, indeed, this most depressingly common of celebrity deaths. Not that you could really call her a full celebrity, since she didn't work a lot after Can't Buy Me Love -- though maybe that was the problem.

I don't know why she didn't work more because she's so good in this movie. She has depth and soul and does quite a lot of non-verbal acting. And what makes that even crazier is that "she was only 15 years old."

When I saw that her death in 2015 was only a few days shy of her 44th birthday, I did some quick math and realized she was born in 1971, just two years before I was. And not the start of 1971 either, but in the summer. So that means when the movie was released in the summer of 1987, she had only just turned 16 -- which means she was 15 while filming.

How often do you see an actor playing a high school student who is actually younger than the character is supposed to be? She's playing a high school senior. Far more common is the actress playing her friend Patty, Darcy DeMoss, who was 23 at the time of filming. Yet even at this tender young age, Peterson had an instinct and a maturity that allowed her, for example, to play drunk in this really convincing and adorable way, while also seeming like a grown-up in her other scenes -- an old soul. It's really rather remarkable.

Koo

My April movie for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta, where you are randomly assigned the highest ranked movie you haven't seen from another member's chart, was Kin-dza-dza, a 1986 Russian film directed by Georgiy Daneliya. And what an absurd little oddity this is.

It involves two Russian men in present day who meet a homeless person who tells them he's from another planet. They don't believe it, but when he transports them there, well, they really have no choice. It's a desert planet and they meet the natives, who at first appear only to speak one word: "Koo." They also have this funny tradition of bowing in deferment to each other that they expect to be reciprocated.

The film involves the two men's attempt to return to Earth, but it's so much more. We learn all their terminology over the course of the movie, and then there's even a glossary of terms that appears during the intermission. There we officially learn what a variety of words mean -- and that "koo" means all other words.

I liken it in my mind to what would happen if Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky and Gilliam all got together to make a movie. It's pretty much a delight and it can be watched for free on YouTube if you're interested.

And finishing with Shadow in the Cloud

Maybe because it's been only 15 months since I saw this the first time, I don't have a new takeaway about Shadow in the Cloud, which was among my top 20 of 2021. I guess I enjoyed it about the same amount.

I suppose the takeaway is a reminder that a movie doesn't need to be long to be effective. This is barely over 80 minutes, which is why I needed it to finish the day and get to bed at a reasonable time. I'm supposed to be recovering from COVID, in case I forgot.

Whether this festival will last only one more day, or more than that, remains to be seen. 

The practical snowman

While prepping my massive list of films I might watch while using my projector at the hotel last month, I noticed that Jack Frost was playing on Amazon. I'd always meant to see it, finding the concept of Michael Keaton reincarnated as a snowman odd to say the least. But I didn't watch it at the hotel because I figured it would be better to wait until it was, you know, actually Christmas season.

Saturday was the night, but when I rocked up to Amazon, I realized the Jack Frost on there was the horror Jack Frost from a year earlier. At the time I didn't realize, I suppose, that there were actually two different movies, though I have certainly seen their different posters at different times in my life. Anyway, if you asked me, I definitely would not have told you that I thought Michael Keaton starred in this movie, whose poster would have been the one I saw on Amazon:

So no Michael Keaton Jack Frost for me.

Except then I realized: "I'm an adult. I don't have to only watch movies I can stream for free. If I need to pay a couple bucks to watch the Michael Keaton Jack Frost, I will."

And sure enough, it was available for rental on iTunes for $2.99.

So the movie, which I marginally liked, was a disappointment in the following way: It wasn't worse. I really expected the idea of a magic harmonica that breathed life into a snowman, when it was wearing the clothes of a boy's deceased father, and that father was the one who started inhabiting the body of this snowman, to be a lot more ridiculous. Within the parameters of what sounds like a pretty absurd setup, it's a pretty conventionally heartwarming story.

I didn't actually know about the magical harmonica beforehand, and that might point to the only sort of absurd part of the movie. Before he dies in a car accident during a blizzard -- spoiler alert -- Keaton's title character is the leader of a kind of honky tonk band, where they wear unironic bowler hats. It's the kind of music Bruce Willis was into for a while there. And apparently it did not seem as ridiculous in 1998 as it undoubtedly was. (That music has its roots in something good, but transformed into a very poor facsimile thereof.)

It's because he's so focused on his music career that Keaton can't be there for things like his son's big hockey game. You get the idea.

In fact, on its own terms, the movie is probably not sufficiently good to earn my slight recommendation, but I'll tell you why I'm giving it:

I really enjoyed the look and feel of the snowman.

"Look and feel" is a term we often use in my regular line of work for the usibility of a piece of software -- its "look" and its "feel." When a new version of something is released, someone might say "The look and feel won't be changing."

But it's appropriate in this case as well because with the practical effects used here, something really does have a "feel."

At first I thought the snowman might be digital. Jack Frost was a year after Starship Troopers, which I continue to hold up as the shining example of a film that defies its time period in terms of visual effects. Twenty-three years later, those arachnids still look good. Titanic was 1997 also.

A digital snowman would be a piece of cake compared to those two movies. But Jack Frost also didn't have the budget of those two movies, so it hardly seems like they'd be at the front of the queue for the best in digital animation. 

I went so far as to google it, which of course revealed that the snowman was a creation of Jim Henson Creature Shop.

I love this for a couple reasons.

The first is that it really does excuse the mild affection I have for this movie, which is pretty out of sync with the film's 19% Rotten Tomatoes score. If you've got Jim Henson puppets in your movie, it means you are part of a smallish fraternity of films that share the DNA of Henson's more obviously wonderful creations. (Never mind that the execrable The Happytime Murders is also in that fraternity.)

The second is that it reminded me of something where I shouldn't have needed any reminding, especially since I rewatched Labyrinth during the aforementioned hotel trip with the projector. It reminded me that puppets can be capable of great expressiveness. 

This snowman was designed in such a way that the individual parts of his face can move independently of each other, and that the puppeteers have to learn how to make these movements. There are four puppeteers credited to this snowman, and since puppeteers don't usually get much credit, let's name them here. Bruce Lanoil and Denise Cheshire are credited as in-suit performers, while Denise Cheshire Pearlman is listed as "head operator" -- which either means she operates Jack's head, or she is the head of all the operators. Interestingly, Denise Cheshire and Denise Cheshire Pearlman appear to be two different people as evidenced by their separate IMDB pages, though surely there is a relationship. Allan Trautman is also credited as "additional puppeteer."

Whatever the combination of techniques and talents, they really make this snowman come alive -- alive in a way that a dead digital creation rarely comes alive, and certainly not in 1998. It's one thing to use a computer to create an arachnid whose face you can't see, who has no personality, and a sinking cruise ship. An actual creature with a soul wouldn't have been up to digital's abilities at the time.

And Jack really is tactile. That's a word that gets thrown around all the time in the debate between practical effects and digital effects, but there's a reason for it, as it perfectly expresses the three-dimensional physicality of a character on screen -- the kind we also see throughout Labyrinth. I suppose there isn't really a "debate" on which would be better, if the possiblity existed to use either technique for the same amount of money, and achieve the same result. Every filmmaker whould use practical effects if he or she could. But practical effects just aren't ... well, practical.

But I'm glad they still have a place in the movies, either because those movies were long enough ago that digital was not yet viable, or because some movies today will repudiate digital in order to create something with a more definitive physical presence.

And the truth is, when that tactile, practial snowman moved its stick eyebrows, its coal eyes or its cork nose, I felt the emotion behind it. 

And so yes, I did believe that a harmonica-playing Bruce Willis wannabe had, for a few magical weeks, returned to this earth in snow form. 

Titanic under the volcano

Pompeii is not a particularly good movie. I should get that out of the way at the start.

But I liked it perhaps more than I should have, because it's nearly exactly what I expected it to be.

I'm not talking about what I expected from the trailers, because actually, I didn't see a single trailer for the movie. No, it was exactly what I expected it to be when I first envisioned it as a movie, almost exactly five years before the date I saw it.

I'm writing this post on September 1st, 2014. On September 1st, 2009, I wrote a post called "Where's my Pompeii movie??", having just come from an exhibit on Pompeii at a Los Angeles museum, and wondering aloud why there had not yet been a big-screen Pompeii movie that benefited from the latest in FX technology.

Here's a bit of what I said in that post, all of which you can read here:

"It plays terrifically in my mind's eye: You have the ornate period architecture of a movie like Gladiator, pelted with raining volcanic rock and washed away in floods of lava. Plus, the whole thing took place by the Bay of Naples, meaning you could have the A.D. 79 watercraft trying vainly to escape in the roiled sea, giving the chance for some cool shipwrecks.

"With that kind of budget, you might have to to tack on a Titanic-style love story to push the audience beyond just young males. But then again, most of these disaster movies try to have Titanic-style love stories anyway, so this isn't much of a concession."

This is, like, exactly the movie Paul W.S. Anderson made.

Both movies I casually referenced here ended up being major influences on Anderson's Pompeii. How nutty is that?

Gladiator may be the most obvious point of comparison, as all the movie's pre-eruption action set pieces involve gladiators in the arena. The lead character played by Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington is known only as The Celt, and a life full of seeking revenge over the slaughter of his parents has turned him into the most badass gladiator in the Roman empire. Well, almost -- the undefeated gladiator he's scheduled to fight is pretty up there, played by Lost's Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. And if you wanted to throw some cop drama tropes in there with everything else unoriginal Pompeii does, this is supposed to be Akinnuoye-Agbaje's "one last fight" before the Romans grant him his freedom. In any case, there are numerous scenes of gladiators fighting in arenas, and even an appearance of the famous "thumbs up-thumbs down" determination of whether a fighter should live or die.

The love story, of course, is all Titanic. And I didn't just throw Titanic out there as an example of any old love story -- it's a love story under the duress of a major catastrophe. The Celt is basically Jack Dawson, the poor boy who gets noticed by the rich girl, as Emily Browning's Cassia fulfills the Rose DeWitt Bukater role -- she's the daughter of the rulers of Pompeii, and she seems to fall in love with him over an incident in which he spares her injured horse further pain by snapping its neck. See, The Celt's people were horse whisperers, of a sort (to borrow from yet another familiar movie). That would put Keifer Sutherland in the Billy Zane role, as Sutherland plays a nasty Roman bigwig who wanted Cassia during her recent excursion to Rome, and has now come to Pompeii in part to take her into his possession in the most demeaning manner possible.

But the real comparison to Titanic is what happens after the disaster starts. The funny thing about a disaster like a ship hitting an iceberg or a volcano burying a coastal city in lava is that it can never feel like something that springs logically from the story. If the best scripts are ones where the action proceeds logically from what is written in the first five pages, love stories set against disasters always feel a bit odd, since the story is hijacked by something sudden, inexplicable and essentially irrelevant. In a tight script, what role should an erupting volcano have in helping sort out all the various dramatic conflicts set in motion during the first half? It shouldn't have any, but that's because natural disasters and man-made accidents both fall into "shit happens" territory in terms of narrative causation.

And so both Titantic and Pompeii are forced, somewhat ridiculously, to have the conflicts continue to play themselves out despite the fact that there is now a much more urgent threat that requires everyone's collective attention. Titanic is not sunk, as it were, by needing some kind of resolution to the DiCaprio-Winslet-Zane love triangle, and I think only that silly scene where Zane is shooting at them from down that stairwell fulfills the role of trying to wrap that story up. After that, Zane rightly realizes that he cares more about his own hide than trying to kill Jack Dawson, especially if it means he has to sink to the bottom of the ocean to do it.

Kiefer Sutherland is not quite so wise in Pompeii. Yeah, he makes a couple thwarted and typically cowardly attempts to escape the city -- slaughtering the peasants in your path, anyone? -- but he probably knows he can't really leave without getting one final showdown with the man who stole the attentions of that woman who despised him and was never going to marry him anyway. So we are treated to the spectacle of them doing battle in the remains of a coliseum being pelted by giant flaming chunks of magma. Naturally, one might say.

It's the spectacle of the final 30 minutes of Pompeii that really saves it, and by "saves it" I mean "makes it worth watching at all." The destruction of Pompeii is more or less exactly what I envisioned it might be in that museum five years ago this weekend. Oh, and remember those cool shipwrecks I speculated about? Not only do we see volcanic rock pulverizing several escaping ships, but we are also treated to a tsunami that delivers a couple of these boats right down Main Street.

Who could have asked for anything more?

I couldn't, which is why Pompeii gets a grudging three stars from me. Good on ya, Paul W.S. Anderson (a.k.a. the lesser Paul Anderson), for making me look pretty damn prophetic.

And a few thoughts about the experience of renting Pompeii ...

Support Video Ezy, you fool 

We had decided to watch a new release on Saturday night, so it was kind of a bummer when my father-in-law had to cancel a Sunday gathering at his house that was going to jointly recognize the birthdays of my son and my sister-in-law. She was sick -- same thing we'd had -- and was in bed all weekend, from what I understand.

It bummed me out because that meant we weren't going to be naturally near a Woolworth's, where we could return whatever movie we rented the night before to the Hoyts kiosk there. We weren't going to be naturally near a Woolworth's on Saturday either, but I figured as long as we could either rent or return the movie with no more than a modicum of inconvenience, we'd be good. A long trip to both rent and return it, and it wouldn't be worth doing.

When I expressed my frustration over the turn of events, my wife said "Why don't you just get the movie from Video Ezy?"

"Video Ezy charges like $5 for a new release," I told her. "The Hoyts kiosk is only $3.50."

Sounded like reasonable logic to me, so it's a good thing I have others to set me straight. "You've got to support Video Ezy if you want them to stay open," she told me. "Why do you think there's never anybody in there?"

It was true. I've rented from Video Ezy probably 20 times, and on only a handful of those occasions were there any other patrons in the store besides me. For most businesses, that would be a sign it was time to go out of business.

And I definitely don't want Video Ezy to go out of business. It's among the last of a dying breed: a place you can go and actually browse for movies to rent by walking up and down aisles. Actual, physical aisles. That experience is becoming increasingly virtual in our day and age, which doesn't bother teenagers in the slightest. For old folks like me? We like the video stores. We value them, even if only for providing us a sense of nostalgia.

It's not like Video Ezy is just down the block or anything. But it's more or less in our neighborhood, at least. And you'd think the comparative convenience would be worth the extra $1.50, especially given how little else you can buy with a meager sum like $1.50 these days.

It was nice, also, to hear my wife urge me to help keep Video Ezy afloat, because it was she I thought I was protecting by trying to go cheap (and frequenting Ezy only on $2 new release Tuesdays). I know I've got a nearly insatiable appetite for new movies, one that far outstretches your average citizen. If I knew I had to feed the beast anyway, sometimes watching movies most regular people would instinctively avoid, the least I could do was not overburden our bank account.

But I felt so good forking over $5 for Pompeii that I also picked up a $1.90 weekly rental of John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and bought my son and me a candy bar each. Mars, it was.

If my eight dollars and change goes a little further toward keeping the neighborhood video store open, then it's something I'm going to do, dammit.

Anniversaries missed

When we talk about missed anniversaries, we tend to think of clueless husbands who can't remember the day they got married, and therefore suffer sleepless nights on the couch as their wives stew over their neglectfulness, until they inevitably win their redemption through some grand gesture, because their wives obviously aren't going to stay mad at them forever. (Run-on sentence intentional.)

But when it comes to movies, you can miss an anniversary not by letting it pass unnoticed, but by acknowledging it too soon. In this case, you "miss" it like you would miss a target.

As is the case with Texas Chainsaw 3D, releasing today, 39 years after the release of Tobe Hooper's original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Why not just wait one more year and make it 40?

The answer: They want their cash grab, and they want it now.

Even considering these base motivations, I'd argue that you should just wait a year. You're still going to make the same amount of money in 2014 as you would in 2013, perhaps a little bit more due to increased ticket prices (which would probably cancel out increases in production costs). You're still going to find 3D about as popular as it is today. But you've got one thing going for you that you don't have in 2013: There may be some people out there who will find this cash grab slightly more legitimate because it comes on the 40th anniversary of the original movie.

Strangely, this series has a history of consummating prematurely. The first reboot of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was ten years ago in 2003 -- a year shy of the original's 30th anniversary. 

Look, you get an opportunity every five years to line up with some kind of anniversary. It needn't be something significant like the 25th or the 50th. The 15th or 35th will do in a pinch. Anyway, something to latch on to that seems to give the film an extra reason for being rebooted/re-released/unleashed on the world again in some form or another.

I understand not shooting for the anniversary if you are right in the middle of the five-year increments -- or will be once you finish the movie. If someone had thought up a 3D version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (because it obviously took a brilliant mind to devise such high art) in 2010, clearly you don't want to wait another four years before capitalizing on your sublime inspiration. But if you're only going to be one year away? Just sit on it for six months, and then start principal photography. 

I should say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not the only film series to blatantly miss an obvious anniversary date, and perhaps not even the most egregious example in the year 2013. Oz: The Great and Powerful, due out in March, will be coming out one year shy of the 75th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz. Just one year. Didn't anyone, anywhere, think of this? The 75th anniversary is also a pretty big deal, because at this point you can no longer get away with acknowledging anniversaries in increments of five years. No one talks about the 55th anniversary of something, or the 70th anniversary of something. That 75th anniversary would have been big.

Would have been.

I guess I have to admit that these things are imperfect. With both, or really all three, of the movies I've mentioned above, any delay in the production could have pushed the movie to that anniversary year. Perhaps they figured that they'd either go early, a pragmatic idea in any business venture, or experience delays and end up lining up with the anniversary, like they'd meant it all along. The worst would be to shoot for the anniversary year, but botch it and come out a year late.

Or most likely, they just didn't care about such things.

The only reason I care about such things, other than a general interest in numerology and a perverse desire to attach relevance to the financially-driven decision to reboot a movie series, is that there have been some examples of incomparable fortuitousness as it relates to the timing of these reboots/re-releases.

Let's take last year's 3D re-release of Titanic. Its release date was doubly fortuitous. Not only was it the centennial anniversary of the doomed ship's sinking, but it was also the 15-year anniversary of the film's initial release. And those anniversaries were even in a position to align in the first place because the movie came out 85 years after the ship sank.

Eighty-five is nobody's idea of some milestone anniversary, but it'll do in a pinch.

"That's an idiom!" And other new thoughts on Titanic

I sat in front of possibly the smartest children ever last night at Titanic.

And when I say "children," I mean they were young. Two girls. Couldn't have been more than six and eight. And it's possible they were only four and six. (I'm better at judging the age of toddlers than little kids.)

I was worried at first whether I'd regret my choice of seat. This movie was set to run three hours and fifteen minutes, which could be anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes longer than these girls wanted to sit still. And when they talked a couple times at the start, I thought I might be in for a long night. Unless I moved, which would probably make their parents feel bad.

But they were extremely well behaved. They only got antsy around the time that (spoiler alert) Rose is floating on top of that ornate wooden door, with Jack fused to her in a frozen death grip. At that point one of them actually had to be taken out of the theater -- she was just done. But before that, they spaced out their random expulsions of commentary quite well, and never fussed.

And one of them may have said just about the most brilliant thing I've ever heard a child that age say.

Brassy Molly Brown (Kathy Bates) has realized that Jack can't show up to the fancy dinner in his steerage clothing, so she outfits him in her son's tuxedo, which is almost the perfect size for him. (Really, it's perfect -- you can't have the dashing Leo DiCaprio wearing a monkey suit that doesn't fit right.). When Brown admires her work in the mirror, she says "You shine up like a new penny!"

The little girl behind me said: "Dad, that's an idiom, right?"

Her dad: "Right."

Mind = blown.

One thing I did wonder was whether they were emotionally mature enough to watch the movie. Not only are there Kate Winslet's boobs and the mostly implied sex scene, but don't forget the little matter of the fifteen hundred people who died on the ship -- many of whom were left as floating corpses in the water, including a dead mother grasping her dead baby in her arms. That's heavy stuff. But the most I heard in terms of real trauma from them was afterward, when one of the girls proclaimed "Mommy, that was a very sad movie."

I have plenty of other thoughts on my viewing of Titanic. Do you have a couple minutes?

The only way to watch a 195-minute movie

I must admit the only thing I really dreaded about watching Titanic again was the length. I'd seen it twice in the theater and a third time on VHS. But that was when I was in my 20s, before the internet had truly destroyed my attention span.

How would I fare in a 195-minute movie at the ripe old age of 38?

My recent experience with watching very long movies is limited. The last two I've tackled have had very similar themes: Ben-Hur and Spartacus. When I watched Spartacus, it took most of the morning and early afternoon on a Saturday, maybe 5+ hours. But that's nothing compared to Ben-Hur. In part because of my circumstances watching it (later at night, after my wife went to sleep), I watched the damn thing in four consecutive 45-minute sittings from a Monday night to a Thursday night.

After last night I realized: The only proper way to watch a movie of such impressive girth is in the theater. There's no temptation to pause and check your email, to make yourself a snack, to go to the bathroom, just to take a breath. The movie doesn't allow you a break. You've got to do it all in one shot, which means you are certain to accomplish the feat (unless you fall asleep, that is).

With Titanic, it was all the better because I didn't have to worry about my bladder, nor falling asleep. If I needed to go to the bathroom, I'd just leave and go to the bathroom. I've seen this movie before. I know what happens and when there are slow moments. (Not many, really.) If nature calls, I can answer. And if sleep calls, I can oblige.

And, psychologically, because I had these options open to me, I didn't have to go to the bathroom and I never came close to nodding off. Well, I had to go to the bathroom by the time I left, but I was even considering holding it until I got home.

James Cameron does nothing halfway

Another big fear many people had about this 3D release of Titanic was the dreaded c-word: "conversion." Namely, in the short history of converting 2D movies to 3D, the process has been almost universally derided as unsuccessful and in fact pointless. The extra dimension derived from this process has, traditionally, been paper thin and utterly perfunctory.

But those people didn't remember that James Cameron does nothing halfway.

If he was going to convert Titanic to 3D, he was going to do it in such a way that the naysayers simply had no ammunition. And by golly, he pulled it off.

I heard Cameron interviewed the other day on NPR, and he said that $16 million went into the 3D conversion of Titanic -- which must be three times the cost associated with converting most movies. (And it made that total back immediately on its $17 million opening weekend.) He also listed some number of years it took them to do it, which could have been anywhere from three to eight. Needless to say, he was involved intimately in every step of the process.

So did you really think he would not pull it off?

I would say that the 3D ranged from more than competent to simply astounding. He achieves an incredible depth of field, which was also an inarguable strength of Avatar. The same technology was doubtless involved. (Yes, I know that Avatar was shot with special cameras, but some of the same revolutionary principles of 3D were no doubt utilized here.)

One thing I wondered was whether watching a 3D movie for over three hours would give me a headache, but the only lasting physical remnant of the experience was a dent on the bridge of my nose where the glasses had rested. It stayed there for at least the next two hours until I went to bed.

James Cameron can also draw out the tension

One thing I noticed on this viewing is how well Cameron milks the sense of tension out of every scenario. There were a couple times I noticed my body rigid with uncertainty about how a scene would turn out, even though this would be my fourth viewing of Cameron's epic.

One scene in particular that really stressed me out was when Rose seeks help to free Jack of his handcuffs. I really noticed how Cameron draws that scene out, demonstrating the couple false starts she makes before finally happening upon the axe as the only way to snap his bonds. You can really see the way her mind wants to collapse under the strain of trying to figure out what to do under the intense pressure of the situation. And even though I knew the waters below deck would not drown Jack, for a tense ten minutes or so, Cameron convinced me it might be otherwise.

The one Michael Bay moment

People who really want to hurt Cameron's feelings might compare him to Michael Bay, which most everyone else would agree is unfair. However, there are some similarities in the scope and themes of the projects they take on, and neither is known for working with particularly subtle dialogue. In fact, there's even a parody trailer for something called Titanic Super 3D going around right now, where the joke is that Rose's loogie literally flies out into the audience, and other creative talents (George Lucas, J.J. Abrams) teamed up with Cameron to make the movie more "super." The segment detailing Bay's contribution shows explosions everywhere you look on the boat, from plates falling to the ground to people bursting into flame as they hit the water.

But there was one single shot that reminded me of something you would see in a Michael Bay movie, and it's that scene where Rose and Jack turn a corner down a new hallway, to escape the wall of water that has just consumed the man and his son behind them. It's done in slow mo and you can see the water crashing behind them, almost as though they were running from an explosion. You know the shot I'm talking about. And it doesn't really help that their running doesn't look particularly urgent in this shot -- that's the kind of thing Bay would miss, not Cameron. (Then again, with that water crashing behind them, maybe they couldn't afford to do many additional takes to get it right.)

An impressive use of extras

One thing that unfailingly impresses me about older epics is how amazingly they choreograph the extras. If Titanic had been made today, it wouldn't have needed all those real people. A lot of those extras would have been digital, and we would have been the lesser for it.

By being forced to go old school -- because the new school hadn't been invented yet -- Cameron gives us a living, breathing sense of being there.

Yes, there are digital effects in Titanic. The sweeping "helicopter shots" of the boat are often done on the computer, and you can really tell sometimes. But there's an impressively small reliance on digital imagery in general. Most of the scenes of people clambering all over each other involve real people, each with their own "character," each with their own set of motivations and back stories, even if only because the extras themselves chose to work out those motivations and back stories. You really notice a thing like that. There isn't some extra off in the corner of the frame who's been programmed on a repeating loop of random, slightly robotic panic. Those panicked people are real.

The framing device

One of the brilliant things about Titanic that gets overlooked is Cameron's decision to set the action in the present and have Rose tell the story of what happened in flashback. It would have been incredibly easy to just tell a straightforward Titanic story that all takes place within those three days in 1912. But it's 20-25 minutes before we even see our first images of the boat in its initial majesty, rather than just existing as a rusting hulk at the bottom of the ocean.

It never occurred to me before to actively think about this as one of the movie's strengths. Since I was so smitten with this movie when I first saw it -- and my opinion of it hasn't really changed much in 15 years -- I tend to think of everything about it as a strength. But on this viewing I specifically pondered the effectiveness of that framing device. No, you can't really say that Bill Paxton's character undergoes a very complicated growth over the course of the narrative. He's really just a guy who's only in it for the money, then does a 180 and starts to really "see it," as he says. But it's great to have that part of the story there to ground us in the present. (Besides, without that, we wouldn't have had Gloria Swanson's wonderful performance.)

DiCaprio ages, Winslet doesn't

I couldn't help thinking as I watched this movie that the 2012 Winslet looks almost exactly like the 1997 Winslet, yet DiCaprio looks quite a bit older. That's even while acknowledging that he still has a baby face.

The whistle

As moved as I tend to be by Winslet meekly mustering the words "Come back! Come back!" to the lifeboat at the end, what really moves me about that scene is the strident look on her face as she blows into that whistle she grabbed off a nearby corpse. This woman was bathed in doubts only two days earlier, but in this moment, she's choosing life, and wants the whole word to know it. She really will never give up.

The old couple lying in bed

Is once again the thing that got me the most.

Programming note

Tonight's regularly scheduled installment of Lady's Choice Movie Night has been preempted so I can go see Titanic.

Actually, the series has been pushed to Wednesday altogether, and it's not just because of Titanic. It's because Rave Motion Pictures at the Howard Hughes Center, a nice and luxurious theater, has introduced $7 movies all day on Tuesdays. At those prices, it simply doesn't make sense to have a recurring conflict on Tuesday nights. At those prices, either my wife or I should be going to a movie every week.

I went for the first time last Tuesday, when I caught The Hunger Games and then snuck into Casa de Mi Padre. So it actually ended up being only $3.50 per movie.

No way I'm sneaking in to another movie after Titanic, even though the 6:30 screening time means that I could. The damn thing is 195 minutes long. Which kind of scares the hell out of me. The good thing is, I've already seen it, so if I need to go to the bathroom, I'll just go.

And actually, Titanic will be more than $7, because the price of 3D still has to be tacked on. But I think it's only $2, or at the most $3, so I'll still be seeing three hours and 15 minutes worth of movie, in 3D, for ten bucks or less.

I know you don't care about this programming change. I just thought I would let you know.

And maybe, there'll be a post tomorrow about my Titanic experience. "Best 3D conversion yet," I've heard.

We'll see.

Still a sucker for Titanic

Hello, and welcome to my second straight post about trailers I saw while at the movies last week.

Looks like I still have the potential to weep like a baby at Titanic.

I saw my first theatrical trailer for the 3D re-release of Titanic before my 3D screening of The Adventures of Tintin. I have to say, the way it was cut to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" made me ready to well up with tears all over again. (Whether you can be "ready" to well up with tears or not is open to debate. I'd say, you either well up or you don't. I guess I'm being vague in an attempt to maintain my credibility as a high-minded film fan.)

I was genuinely surprised by my own reaction. Now, I have never thrown Titanic under the bus, and remain a person who argues ardently for its importance as a film and the uniqueness of its achievement. But did I expect that it would still be able to tug at my heartstrings, a full 14 years after I first saw it?

No, I did not.

I believe I've seen Titanic three times -- twice in the theater, then once on video. They would have all been within the first year after it was out. During the intervening 14 years, my affection for it has been only slightly muted, since I still consider it to be one of the most overwhelming and involving theatrical viewing experiences I've ever had. The unique combination of awe-inspiring visuals and human drama left me babbling incoherently when I left the theater.

I'd expect the visuals to still inspire awe in me, but shouldn't the human drama have lost some of its potency over the years? Especially as Titanic has been repeatedly parodied, as its iconic scenes have become so familiar to us, and as it has been the recipient of some of the greatest backlash of any film in history? As it's become downright shameful to admit that the justifiably reviled Celine Deon could have sung a song you even liked, let alone one that moved you to tears?

Yet despite all the factors that should work against Titanic still having an emotional impact on me, the way that trailer is cut brought me right back to December of 1997, to that theater in Massachusetts where I first saw James Cameron's film. (For the record, it's the old couple lying on their bed as the water rushes under them that devastates me the most.)

I'm going to blame it on the big screen. And the 3D. Yeah. Definitely the 3D. The 3D got me all verklempt. That's it.

But am I ready to pay $15 to see it again in 3D?

I don't know, maybe I am.

Now to figure out the alibi I'll use with my wife, a strident Titanic hater ...

I'm getting worse at this

Used to be, just a little bit of smart planning, and I'd be guaranteed to successfully execute a theatrical double feature.

You know, the kind where you pay for the first and sneak into the second. I do it -- I admit it. I've admitted it numerous times on this blog.

Starting at the beginning of 2011, though, I've now had three attempts in a row that were marred by some kind of bad luck or brushes with the law. At least the one this past Saturday was considerably less traumatizing than the other two.

Just to refresh your memory, the first double feature I attempted in 2011 was to see The Green Hornet and Blue Valentine. That one was kind of botched from the get-go, in the sense that I'd been intending to see Blue Valentine and Another Year, but when they switched which movie was playing in which wing of the building, I had to drop Another Year for a movie that was playing in the same wing as Blue Valentine. I successfully saw both movies, but I lost my wallet somewhere in the process. I ended up getting it back, but not for three weeks, and I'd already ordered a new license and credit cards by then, plus suffered about four days of depression related to the loss.

The second botch was at the drive-in, and it also involved The Green Hornet. We paid to see Battle: Los Angeles and The Green Hornet, knowing that we intended to switch theaters after Battle: LA to try to finish with Hall Pass and Red Riding Hood. But the "drive-in cops" (guys in golf carts) stopped us from entering the second theater, and in a panic of indecision, we simply left the grounds and drove home.

This past Saturday night I was supposed to see Water for Elephants and Hanna. I even cased the joint earlier in the day to make sure that the movies were playing in the same wing. This was no certain task because Water for Elephants was actually playing on three screens, only two of which were in the same wing as Hanna. But I timed things out perfectly so that my 8:00 showing of Water for Elephants would have led directly into a 10:00 showing of Hanna. I wouldn't be able to use the bathroom between movies, because the bathroom was on the other side of the ticket taker from me. But as long as I wasn't too desperate after the two-hour Elephants, I should be able to hold on for the 1:50 Hanna, especially since it would be starting immediately, with no downtime in between.

And it should have worked out perfectly. I even snuck in two cans of soda and other snacks in my skateboarder pants -- you know, the ones that are torn, too small and should be replaced, but are still useful because of their large additional pockets. My bladder was in fine shape at the end of Elephants and everything.

The problem was, this is a very nice theater, with lots of very nice but very attentive ushers. The screening room where I saw Elephants was the first in the wing, its door right next to the ticket taker. Perhaps to prevent the very thing I was trying to do, they had extended one of those cordons, the ones that recess back in on themselves like a tape measure, out from the exit of the theater to directly where the ticket taker was standing. So instead of just ducking off to my right as I exited, I would have had to go around the ticket taker, who would see me exiting this screening room and know I was up to something. With no time to adapt to this sudden realization, I just let the flow of the exiting crowd carry me out, and just like that, it was done. No second movie.

For a moment I considered trying to pull some bologna like just flashing a stub and walking back in with confidence, to get down to the Hanna theater. But part of having very nice, very attentive ushers is that you feel a lot worse trying to pull one over on them. It's one thing to see a second movie as a "crime of opportunity" that involves little to no consternation on anyone's part. It's another to actively deceive the theater staff in order to see a movie for free.

The other thing I did wrong was that I reversed my usual philosophy about which movie you're supposed to see first. Because there's always the chance that you won't see the second movie, for one reason or another ("too tired" could always be a reason), you should see the movie you're more interested in first. In order to do that with Hanna, however, I would have had to go to a 7:30 Hanna and a 9:55 Water for Elephants. That would have left me with a good half-hour of downtime, during which I would still have been torturously prevented from using the bathroom. What's more, the extra time would mean I'd have to dodge people cleaning theaters, etc.

Fortunately, I liked Water for Elephants enough that I didn't mind it being the only movie I saw. Sure, the presence of Robert Pattinson sent off some warning flares. But I also know he's trying to move away from Twilight and forge a serious acting career, so I didn't expect this movie would be aimed at teenage girls. At least, not only at teenage girls.

The beauty of Water for Elephants, in fact, is that for the first time in a long time, I didn't know what to expect. I hadn't heard any review of it, in part because there was no new Entertainment Weekly this week after last week's double issue. I hadn't even heard any buzz, positive or negative. All I knew was the footage from the ads, which made me think of three different films for which I have decent to high levels of affection: Moulin Rouge!, Big Fish and Australia. If Water for Elephants could fit into the same category as those films, we'd have a winner.

But I didn't know. It's so strange to go to a movie not knowing anything about whether it's supposed to be good or not. Just by our immersion in the cinematic world, we film fans usually have a pretty good idea whether a movie is getting praised or panned, even if it hasn't come out yet. Therefore, seeing it is always a matter of living up (or down) to those expectations, of exceeding (or failing to exceed) them. It was quite refreshing to come into a movie with no expectations -- except for those I could glean from my own analysis of the trailers.

One thing that struck me about Elephants was that it made me feel like I'd never seen a movie about the circus before. Surely that isn't true -- I can name a few off the top of my head. But one of the things this movie does well is that it gives you a supposed insider's look into the business of circuses, and has a couple compelling storytelling techniques to assist with that. For example, one of my favorite sequences was when Pattinson's character is led through the train carrying the Benzini Brothers circus, by the inevitable salty old character who takes him under his wing. Director Francis Lawrence didn't achieve it all in one take, but it still had a similar feel to Martin Scorsese's famous shot in Goodfellas, where Henry Hill is led through a microcosm of the underworld (you know, the restaurant scene). Did I just compare Water for Elephants to Goodfellas? Yep, I think I did. Another scene involves the wonder and awe of seeing a 1930s big-top erected from the ground up, accompanied by just the right score. In these ways, Water for Elephants is something of a "circus procedural," I guess you could say.

But what I really liked was how grandiose it was. Not only the big-top, not only the menagerie of animals, and not only the amazing titular elephant, named Rosie, who makes you love an elephant like no movie has ever made you love an elephant. But just every piece of the cinematography. There's a scene where Pattinson's Jacob and Chrtisophe Waltz's August climb atop the train as it chugs through the American countryside, and view that countryside while walking the length of the train. The whole scene is bathed in this glorious moonlight and just looks gorgeous. I love seeing someone work on a big canvas like this.

The epic quality of the movie was also mirrored in the central love triangle between the vicious August, his beautiful but fearful wife Marlena (Reese Witherspoon) and Jacob. This is old-world movie stuff, with Jacob as a righteous hero, Marlena as an imprisoned soul desperate to escape, and August as a hissable villain, whose treatment of human beings and animals is equally malevolent. Waltz is brilliant again, after his obvious brilliant turn in Inglourious Basterds, and then taking (the again aforementioned) Green Hornet off. In fact, something about the whole production was so giant and old-world that it reminded me of another movie: Titanic. Similar love triangle, similar story told in flashback from the present day. Similar impact? No, but you're talking about the second-highest grossing film of all time, so that's asking a lot.

Compared to the four films I mentioned, I found it to be not as good as Titanic or Moulin Rounge!, almost as good as Big Fish, and better than Australia. That's not saying much for those of you who didn't care for Australia, but I did, so it's good praise from me.

And a word about the director, Francis Lawrence. I had him pegged as a total genre director, as he'd previously helmed Constantine (which I liked at the time, not so much in retrospect) and I Am Legend (which I liked a lot and still do). Turns out that branching out into epic period stuff looks good on him. He really had the feel for it.

And it's not for teenage girls. It's a movie that should speak to the romantic that exists in most of us, but it also has good substance. Ever been curious about how a fringe circus survived during the Great Depression? What desperation will drive men to do? Water for Elephants wraps that in there, too.

Okay, enough shilling. Let's just say that it was nice to walk away from my single feature, feeling as satisfied as I might have felt if I'd seen two.

Why I root for James Cameron

Avatar shattered the $400 million threshold at the U.S. box office this past weekend, having already become the all-time second-biggest international grosser at well over $1 billion.

At first I didn't think it would be such a box office force. When it made "only" $77 million in its domestic opening weekend -- a pittance compared to Twilight: New Moon's $142 million -- I thought it might end up being the kind of flop everyone thought Titanic would be.

And surprisingly, this filled me with disappointment. I actually felt bad for James Cameron, albeit very prematurely.

I should feel the need to deny that reality publicly -- or, at least, not write a blog post specifically calling attention to it. But I try to be as honest as I can with you, so I'm telling you: I had a moment's feeling of melancholy about the prospective box office failure of Avatar.

Of course, we all know what happened. Like Titanic, Avatar had legs. Where Titanic settled in and started making $25 million per weekend for ten weekends in a row, and then dropped to a still-healthy $10-$15 million for a few more weekends, Avatar has not made less than $48 million in any of its four weekends. It could actually challenge Titanic's $600 million domestic record, albeit with the help of 12 years of inflation, plus the higher cost of IMAX and 3-D tickets. (Whereas New Moon dropped off significantly after opening weekend and eventually topped off around $280 million).

I'll ask my international readers to forgive me for discussing box office in domestic terms only -- they're the terms I'm more comfortable with.

So now I've got a different problem: I have to worry about this inferior film toppling my beloved Titanic, the reason I root for Cameron in the first place.

And in order to contextualize that even more controversial statement, I suppose I should tell you about the first time I saw Titanic, which helped me embrace that movie as my own.

It was Thursday, December 18, 1997. Titanic was set to open the next day, and I was the reporter for a weekly newspaper in Rhode Island. I would later wear a second hat as their film critic, but that was a few months off, so it was in my capacity as a reporter that I was invited to the grand opening of a glistening new multiplex in nearby Seekonk, Massachusetts. Truth be told, this story would never be covered in the pages of The Barrington Times, where I worked -- we only covered issues directly related to the town. But an invitation to this gala event had fallen into my hands, so not only did I attend, I also invited a friend, who drove down from Boston for the occasion.

When we showed up at the theater, we knew it would be a big deal. There were people walking around in tuxedos, and the lobby was lined with tables full of champagne and shrimp cocktail. There were masses of important people gathering, many of them better dressed than we were. But we weren't concerned with any impression we might or might not be making. We were like kids in a candy store -- literally, more on that in a minute -- and felt kind of like we'd won Wonka's golden ticket. After my press credentials were verified, no one else would be checking in on us for the rest of the night. In fact, conveniently, I didn't know another soul there.

The dozen screens were all playing one of two movies, both scheduled for release the next day: Titanic and Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan's second turn as James Bond. Ordinarily we would have both been jazzed for the Bond movie, and as it turned out, that's my favorite Bond movie of the last 20 years. But Titanic at least figured to be a spectacle, and we didn't have anywhere else we needed to be for the next three hours and 14 minutes, so there was never any question which one we'd select.

But there was still plenty more consumption of free stuff before we got to that point. In addition to the flutes of champagne and endless supply of shrimp, there were various other crudities and hors d'oeuvres, some of which were actually being delivered around by those men in tuxedos. My friend and I would look at each other and laugh, like we were getting away with something. This feeling only intensified -- as did the laughter -- when it came time to stock up on concessions. And I don't choose the words "stock up" casually. The guys standing at the concession counters encouraged us to take multiple boxes of Goobers, Raisinets and Snow Caps. One wasn't enough. Two wasn't enough. They knew these were all going to the same customer, and yet they kept offering them. Still only a couple years out of our teens, my friend and I made the most of this, filling our pockets with candy and then returning to my car to empty them, to make room for more. We each came away with at least ten boxes of movie theater candy, and stomachs that hurt from laughing so hard. Popcorn and drinks had considerably less shelf life/portability, so with those, we took only what we could carry into the theater.

The capper to this gala evening was when some local politician -- a state senator, a congressman, someone like that -- gave a short speech and cut the ribbon on the new state-of-the-art complex. The room filled with applause, and with balloons, which fell from the ceiling right on cue.

Of course, the real capper was Titanic. Picture me 12 years less jaded than I am today, and you will understand why the movie hit me as hard as it did. I teared up several times and left the theater proclaiming that it was one of the best movies I'd ever seen. In fact, I emailed several friends upon arriving home, telling them to drop what they were doing and go RIGHT NOW to see it.

And because I had this highly special screening of Titanic, one night before the rest of the world had a chance to see it, I felt like Titanic was my movie -- a movie where I helped create the hype, rather than just responding to it, even if my role in the hype machine was limited to my friends and acquaintances. Because of that special night, I will always cherish my first screening of Titanic, even long after its flaws have been amply documented by people who were as jaded then as I probably am now. I like remembering that version of me, the version that was swept off his feet by James Cameron's epic. I prefer that memory to whatever hollow credibility I might gain by making snide remarks about Titanic today. And I do consider it hollow when a person goes for credibility by selling out what they honestly think and feel about a movie. I say it to people all the time: I will never throw Titanic under the bus, will never disown the memory of December 18, 1997, when I felt like I was walking on air.

As I was following Titanic's bravura box office performance from then until Oscar night and beyond, I cheered James Cameron, as I felt like his crowning achievement was being appreciated by others just as I had appreciated it. Even when he declared himself "king of the world" at the Oscars, I found it charming rather than smug.

Somehow, that feeling toward Cameron -- that desire to see him succeed beyond any shadow of a doubt -- has stuck with me. Not only did I want Avatar to be good for its own sake, but I wanted it to provide validation to James Cameron, a man who needs no validation from me or anyone else. In part because it's just one more endorsement of my enthralling experience of a little film called Titanic.

Unfortunately, I don't like Avatar as much as Titanic -- not nearly. My take on the film isn't much different from the standard one: Breathtaking visuals, totally unoriginal story. Cameron wrote both movies, so my conclusion is that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet sold that one to us better by being better actors than those in Avatar. They had something magical that grabbed the zeitgeist in just such a way. Avatar is impressive, a film I would certainly describe as "very good" -- it just didn't have that certain spark.

So given what I've told you, am I still rooting for James Cameron? Or am I rooting against a new version of James Cameron in favor of an older model? Or would Avatar outgrossing Titanic still be an endorsement of Titanic in some strange way?

Well, one thing that's always easy to do is root for quality. And even though the 24-year-old Vance may have been more naive and idealistic than the 36-year-old Vance, I think either version would have liked Titanic better. With or without being hopped up on Goobers and Raisinets.

What can I say, I've got a soft spot for sweaty palms slapped against car windows.